Radlines:About

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Revision as of 15:13, 27 May 2018 by Mikael Häggström (talk | contribs) (→‎Structure: Specified)
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Radlines (at radlines.org) is an online source for radiologists. It is an international, non-profit open access MediaWiki-based online source that is editable by doctors, as well as selected administrators, while everyone is welcome to leave comments and suggestions at talk pages.

Participation

Editors of articles must be doctors of medicine, or have formal expertise in radiology by other means. The Discussion pages, on the other hand, are editable by everyone, even without logging in, for comments and suggestions. Newcomers start participating by creating an account at:

This provides a username, but to make edits to articles, newcomers also need to specify their professional status at:
- Form: Application for Editor status (link)
This will be reviewed by the board, and will generally be approved within an hour during European daytime for radiologist or a radiology trainee with a Doctor of Medicine degree. It does not require attaching any credentials such as a medical diploma. Yet, all edits made by the user are tracked in the MediaWiki software, and upon any irregular behavior, an investigation will be performed wherein the user may be requested to provide identification and credentials to the board. Failure to provide those items may result in that edits made by that user will be reverted. Thus, the activity of an editor is the main "job interview" in order to contribute. A possible adverse effect of this system is that the board may not know for certain whether an editor is actually a doctor or not, as long as she/he claims to be a doctor and edits like one. Yet, the quality of the content is thereby practically the same.

An Editor may still use an anonymous username, but real names must be used in the author lists at the top of articles, see Radlines:Authorship.

Content structure

Articles in Radlines can be directly found by search engine, either by the internal search box at top, or external ones. In addition, each article subject should be connected with the main page through a series of pages, so that a radiologist can find their way to it by appearance or other distinction of the condition. For example, Pneumonia on a chest X-ray should be found by the following sequence:

Further information: Editorial guidelines.

What Radlines is NOT

  • Radlines is NOT a place to cut and paste copyrighted material, see Radlines:Copyright
  • Radlines is NOT a place to promote own research, websites or organizations
  • Radlines is not a mirror or a repository of images or media files: Uploads need to be relevant in the course of work for a radiologist, and must be properly integrated in its context, see Radlines:Editorial guidelines
  • Radlines is NOT a place for editors who are protective of their prose: The project is collaborative, which means that other editors may edit and move the content
  • Radlines is NOT a place to get personal medical advice, see Radlines:Disclaimer

Differences from Radiopaedia

Radlines is in most ways a non-profit and ad-free alternative to Radiopaedia, which is currently the most comprehensive wiki-based reference work in radiology. Radiopaedia is a "business" owned by Investling.com,[1] making profit by advertising and paid subscription. Radlines, on the other hand, is able to run on donations and volunteer time alone.

Furthermore, Radiopedia by default uses the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, which makes the material ineligible for integration into for example Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia. The "NonCommercial" part is contradictory to the business nature of the site. Content in Radlines, on the other hand, is by default licensed as Attribution 4.0 International license, which will allow the content to be used by more scholarly websites around the world.

Radiopaedia Radlines
Non-profit No Yes
Ads or paid subscription Yes No
Financial statement Secret Open
Default license BY-NC-SA 3.0 BY 4.0

Radiopaedia started out in the same (but older versioned) WikiMedia system before switching to a separate platform, but MediaWiki has since evolved substantially, including support for scrollable stacks to display for example CT scans, and VisualEditor for editing without needing to learn wiki coding.

Differences from other radiology-related sources

  • wikiradiography.net is a free website for radiographers, sonographers and students of those professions, rather than radiologists.
  • Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia that does contain extensive information in radiology, but does not focus on presenting the information in an optimally concise way for radiologists in the course of their work.

Financial statement

Expenses for 2018:

  • Server hosting May 13, 2018 to May 12, 2019: $420
  • Domain registration of radlines.org: $12

History

Radlines was created April 10, 2018 by Mikael Häggström, who is a radiology resident in Sweden, a frequent Wikipedia editor (Wikipedia presentation), and also creator and editor-in-chief of WikiJournal of Medicine. The project was started as "Radviser" on Miraheze, a free MediaWiki host, but moved to Civihosting servers on May 13. It was renamed to "Radlines" on May 23.

See also

References

  1. . Our Businesses. Investling.com. Retrieved on 2018-05-14.